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Two new books on John Calhoun and his rodent experiments

At first, scientists just wanted to figure out the best way to kill these pests. Then they decided that studying rat society could reveal the future of our own.

At about the time Calhoun wrote his article, a group of researchers at the University of Illinois decided to calculate what would happen if the number of people on the globe continued to increase along the trajectory it had followed for the previous two millennia. He took to calling himself an ℞evolutionist, which, he explained, was “a new type of ‘revolutionary,’ where ℞ is the prescription for, or design of, evolution.” He decided to try to engineer the “conceptual evolution” of rats with an experimental setup that would force the animals to coöperate to get at food and water. Whether or not Calhoun proposed “an early version of the world wide web,” as Dugatkin claims, the Internet has certainly linked “more and more individuals in a common communication network.” And, it could be argued, our increasingly intelligent laptops and cell phones count as “thinking prostheses.” But where, oh where is the compassion?

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